Dear Sirs and Madams at Cyan Worlds, Dear Community.
I have a modest proposal to speed up open sourcing the game on your tight budget and with limited resources.
As far as I know, you currently intend to rewrite the game to use nonpropietary APIs so you can release it as a working game.
I think it would be better if you would hand over that process to the community by releasing individual files - everything that can be released should just be put on a Google Code project ( or similar ) and receive a Licence header.
The process would be very time efficient, as you could just open up the current revision of Myst Online ( in whatever IDE you have), or even better, the last revision that was running at GameTap. Check every file if it contains any code that doesn't belong to you, and if it doesn't, paste a copyright and licence note in it and copy the file to another folder.
If you were to do that for around half an hour, you could probably check around 30-40 files. You could then zip that folder and just post it in that forum - the community will take care of hosting it, etc.
If you do that every day, you might have a very large portion of the game released in a matter of weeks, and the community can work into the partial source code, even though we might be unable to actually build a complete game. When the process is finished, we can reimplement the missing files/functions.

Obviously, a set of working binaries for client and server would also help VERY much ( so we can test for compliance, etc ) and people could already start modding some aspects of the game with only the binaries.

It might be frustrating for some that this open source release would not be a finished product - but it would be a major milestone. We have a lot of talent in the community, which could reconstruct something workable even from the most chaotic amalgamation of random sources ( as much as possible is helpful ) .

I was in quite a hurry when posting this, and will probably re-edit this post later on, but it would be very kind if others could comment on that. If we agree on this or a similar proposal, I could draft a letter to Cyan Worlds so they know we have reached a form of consensus.
Yours truly,
Julian Bangert
--Open source programmer

I wouldn't presume to tell Cyan how long it will take them to inspect the code. Telling a developer something is easy without knowing their platform/architecture and without having the same intimate knowledge as the developers themselves about the code is very off-putting.